Egg - Egg
Egg - Polite Force
Egg - A Civil Surface
There’s another keyboard trio that starts with E and only uses three letters and they’re a band with a much longer resume. However, I’ve never particularly rated this E-band either, so given the Eclectic remasters, it seemed like a good time to revisit them, which I managed to do completely out of order. I was actually pretty surprised at the opinions I came to.
Both the Polite Force and A Civil Surface remain at 9s for me, although I mean 9s in the very best possible sense of the grade. A Civil Surface doesn’t even really seem like an Egg album given its later recording and augmented band and it picks up similarities from the Virgin/Caroline stable it was part of. There’s a lot of nice music here and the whole thing seems a bit delicate in a way, but there are no compositions here that truly stand out.
The Polite Force is generally the pick for the best Egg album and I’ve tried and will probably keep trying to get this album to trigger as there are certainly some great moments on it, but overall I was as (relatively) unmoved by it as I ever was. And then I put the s/t disc on. Did Eclectic bewitch this thing? I remember it being my least favorite of the three albums, but I was almost blown away this listen. Part of it might be the bonus material which is at least as good as the album’s music. Most of it was just how sonically fantastic it sounded, everything being much clearer than I remember any version being. But wow did I enjoy this listen, enough to bring it up to a 10 (the listen was more like a 12, but so far it seems like an anomaly). I was actually surprised how heavy they were at this point. And I do love Mont Campbell’s voice…